Synopsis

After Chris Nielsen dies in an accident, he awakens in a vividly imagined afterlife and struggles to accept his separation from his wife, Annie. When Annie dies by suicide and becomes trapped in a nightmarish realm, Chris refuses to abandon her. Guided by mysterious companions, he journeys through increasingly dangerous landscapes, confronting grief, guilt, and the limits of love.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film adapts Richard Matheson's 1978 novel of the same name, although the screenplay reshapes much of the book's material for the screen.

• The title comes from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, specifically the soliloquy beginning "To be, or not to be."

• Much of the film's afterlife imagery was designed to resemble a moving painting. Visual effects artists developed a technique that applied animated brushstrokes to live-action footage, creating the distinctive painterly sequences.

• Production designer Eugenio Zanetti and the visual effects teams drew inspiration from painters including Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet.

• The production created an extensive collection of artificial jacaranda flowers to transform streets into the blue-purple landscape envisioned for the film. The flowers were attached to large trees by hand.

• Director Vincent Ward estimated that about 75 percent of the film takes place in the afterlife and that the production required approximately 250 to 260 visual-effects shots.

• One computer-generated tree contains thousands of branches and approximately 500,000 leaves. The leaves were digitally animated as they blew away in the wind.

• The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the 71st Academy Awards. It also received a nomination for Art Direction.

• The sequence in which Chris enters a painted landscape was created with software developed by technical adviser Pierre Jasmin and visual effects artists Nicholas Brooks and Joel Hynek.

• The production filmed in Montana, including demanding mountain locations. For one windy scene, Robin Williams was secured to a large tree as a safety precaution.

• The film's visual design became its most widely recognized legacy. Contemporary critics often praised its ambitious color schemes, production design, and effects even when they found the story less convincing.